What Didn’t Happen After Kosovo Killing May Be Significant

By

Laurence Norman

Sep 21, 2013 2:05 pm ET

The killing Thursday morning of a 35-year-old Lithuanian father-of-two, the first on-duty death the European Union’s Kosovo law-and-order mission has suffered since its launch, was a tragic reminder of the many challenges still facing the peace process between Serbia and its former province.

Yet the reaction to Thursday’s event, say European and local officials, was also significant. It showed how tensions have eased on the ground and how entrenched diplomacy, instead of violence, has become.

Many facts remain unclear about exactly what happened early Thursday morning on the road leading from a joint Serbian-Kosovo manned border gate in northern Kosovo to Mitrovica, the divided city that straddles Albanian-dominated southern Kosovo and the Serb-dominated north.

What is clear however is that vehicles of the EULEX mission came under gunfire around 7.30 am. Officials say one of the two vehicles crashed. Later Thursday morning, Lithuanian customs officer and EULEX staffer Audrius Senavicius died in a Mitrovica hospital. It appears he died of gunshot wounds not the ensuing crash, according to one official familiar with the details. A second Czech EULEX official was hospitalized but was not in a serious condition. As of Saturday, there had been no arrests.